Outer solar system

Name: Elvina Fahlgren

The course project for Scientific Visualization was about simulate and vizualize the outher solar system using Python and Blender. This Notebook consists of my solutions for the vizualization.

Setting up the scene and simulation

To create the scene with the six planets I did a for-loop through the given list of names of the planets. I created a sphere corresponing to each planet with its right position from the given array. Here, I choosed to give every planet the same radius.

To simulate the planets orbits, I created a for-loop which inserted a keyframe to every planet every 100th frame. See code below.

Adding textures

I downloaded texture images from the given website. And used those as images textures, as described in the project description.

For the rings of Uranus and Saturn I used the texture images from the given website. To apply the images correctly, I followed this solution. And to make them transparent I changed the Blend Mode to Alpha Blend and adjusted the transparency with Alpha.

I also rotated Saturn and Uranus to give them a more realitic look.

Background

I created a background with stars using a ColorRamp and Noise Texture. I followed this solution and tried out differnt values to get something that looked like space.

I also added some Ambient Occlusion to be able to see the planets clearly.

The sun

I spend most of my time creating the sun, but it ended up not being as good as I expected. I first tried making an emisson from the sun (as described in the project description), but I wanted the bloom effect and therefore swaped to render enginge Eevee. I made the bloom effect and it looked cool. I also tried putting a normal light inside the sun so it looked like even more light was coming from the sun not having to use a stronger emission on the sun. It looked cool, but after rendering photos and an animation, it did not look good because of the bad quality. So I ended up with the sun that I had in the begining. I increased the Ambient Occlusion for the background since I wanted my animation on the sun to be visible (with too high emission strength, the sun texture was not possible to see).

For the texture and texture animation on the sun I used this tutorial. For the animation, I inserted keyframes to the W value at Musgrave Texture. And here is my result of the sun:

Camera animation

For the camera animation I followed this guide, creating a path which an empty object is following and in turn, the camera has the empty object as its parent. In the middle of the animation, you can see that the camera moves slower, and that is because I inserted keyframes there. I thought it looked better.

Final result